JetBlue took the unusual step of requesting a ground stop for all flights this morning, with the US airline resuming operations less than an hour later and blaming the stop on “a brief system outage.”
The request was made to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and an Air Traffic Control System Command Center advisory was issued at 0530 UTC (signed at 0439). The ground stop was canceled in an advisory issued at 0610.
A ground stop is used to temporarily halt flights, usually due to weather or operational issues. Flights already underway are not affected, but new departures are not permitted. It is unusual for an airline to make the request, and it can be very expensive for the airline involved. Even though the ground stop in this instance was relatively short, JetBlue will have to deal with the logistical issues of aircraft missing departure and arrival slots and potentially requiring repositioning.
In a statement to The Register, the airline said: “A brief system outage has been resolved and we have resumed operations.”
No further information regarding the nature of the outage or its cause was forthcoming. The FAA has yet to respond to our questions.
As many of our readers are now imagining, it is not difficult to picture a harassed engineer turning everything off and on again following an unexpected technical problem. However, we are sure the reality is far more complicated.
US travelers have not been having the best of times lately. IT problems kept Alaska Airlines aircraft on the ground last year as backups and redundant systems “didn’t kick in,” according to the airline’s CEO. A partial US government shutdown is also wreaking havoc with checkpoints managed by the Department of Homeland Security.
The Register will update this article when JetBlue provides an explanation for the outage. In the meantime, the ground stop has been canceled and, for the sake of travelers around the US, wobbling systems have been steadied. ®